It was hard to imagine worse times would come for the UCP, but they did. That is, the book ban.

First came complaints from parents and religious leaders about inappropriate books in Alberta school libraries. Did the UCP know there were graphic novels in Alberta school libraries that contain visual depictions of sex between teenagers…? The consensus among UCPers: these books must be removed. Banning them seemed even better.

But first some boundaries had to be set, a bureaucratic framework for the action. The premier put her minister of education on the job, and he produced a doozy: a ministerial directive that spared no detail. “Explicit sexual content” was defined and minutely described: which body parts would be allowed to touch or enter which other body parts. The bit about “artificial sexual organs or substitutes” was an eye-opener. It was somewhat of a relief when the minister added “non-sexual acts” would be okay, as would “non-explicit sexual acts.”

Page two of the directive got into “non-explicit sexual content.” Again, no detail was spared. First of all, “non-sexual content means content that is not sexual in nature.” That’s pretty clear. The same catalogue of body parts is mentioned. But page two lists exceptions. Body parts and activities can be depicted if relating to medical conditions, examination and treatment and the understanding of human development. Another exception is religious scripture—I suppose meaning those kinky bits in the Old Testament.

Ayn Rand’s wooden prose and romantic scenes have a dual effect. They put your teenagers off both sex and reading.

But then the minister made a very important distinction. Sexual depiction is allowed if it “is for information and is not narrative.” There. He pinned it down. The dangerous smut occurs in fiction: novels and stories. Mind you, I’m not sure what we’ll do with smutty personal diaries, which, technically, are non-fiction. But I’ll move on.

To show that the Alberta government is not entirely against healthy romance between young people and their little gestures of fondness, it produced another list of those things young people can be shown doing in the name of affection: hand-holding, perhaps a chaste kiss. But for kids below Grade 10, even non-explicit sexual content is out. I guess there will have to be a ruling on books with hand games: pattycake, hand-stacking and thumb-wrestling—especially if these books are in narrative form.

At any rate, the school libraries of Alberta would have until October 1 to comply with the directive.

Things quickly went awry. A document appeared on social media: a list of books the Edmonton Public School Board said it would have to remove from its libraries to comply with the ministerial directive. It has 221 books by over 90 authors!

On the EPSB list were several titles by Canada’s Nobel literary laureate, Alice Munro. Another title was the Governor General’s Award-winning novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood—arguably the most read Canadian novel in history. Beloved Canadian First Nations authors made the list. So did George Orwell’s famous anti-fascist novel 1984. A surprise for me was to find US author Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s mid-20th century novels are regarded highly by America’s political right for their stout defence of selfishness and greed. Danielle Smith was in fact annoyed by Atlas Shrugged’s proposed banning. She told a reporter that the book should be “mandatory reading in high school.” I personally read Shrugged in high school and, trust me, Rand’s wooden prose and romantic scenes have a dual effect. They will put your teenagers off both sex and reading.

When the EPSB list became public, our premier called the board’s action “vicious compliance.” I tried to think of another example of “vicious compliance” but couldn’t. I’ll fall back on a quote I remember from Canadian publishing legend Jack McClelland about book banning: “You set your sights on Larry Flynt [publisher of Hustler] and you hit Margaret Laurence every time.”

I think the dagger moment in all of this was when Atwood herself heard news she was banned in Alberta and posted online a little story she’d written to comply with the directive. Her tale is about a perfect Alberta couple that manages to have five perfect children without having sex.

The premier came back with a plaintive little line to the effect that all her government really wanted gone were the four graphic novels. Then I guess that’s what they should have said. Hindsight, eh?

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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daniel zekveld says no

Policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action Canada

Governments that make sex ed mandatory overstep their authority. By making sex ed opt-in, Alberta’s government is respecting parents’ authority to direct children’s education.

In R. v. Audet (1996), Supreme Court justice Gérard Vincent La Forest wrote, “Parents delegate their parental authority to teachers and entrust them with the responsibility of instilling in their children a large part of the store of learning they will acquire during their development.” That is, parents don’t relinquish their authority over a child’s education when they send the child to school but continue to exercise it. The government has a legitimate interest in ensuring children receive an education, whether in public or private schools or at home. But the content of sex ed, the moral views of parents and the position of parents in their child’s life point to the need to maintain parental authority over sex education.

Sex education in Canada varies between provinces, as do governments’ approaches to parental involvement in education. Ontario’s sex ed curriculum, for example, was updated in 2015 and 2019 to include elements such as consent, gender identity and sexual orientation, pornography, masturbation and various types of sexual activity. Sex ed curriculum today goes beyond biology, human reproduction and disease prevention. It includes more-controversial topics, at younger and younger ages. Today’s sex ed can lead parents to wonder if not what subjects are being taught, then at least how they’re being taught.

Some parents and advocates believe sex ed should emphasize abstinence as the best way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases or an unplanned pregnancy. Others might encourage children to explore their sexuality, teaching them how to have sex safely. Still others stress that sexual intimacy should be reserved for a committed relationship. There is no consensus on what should be included and at what age. Reasonable people will disagree, because sex ed goes beyond facts and into questions of morality and values. Topics such as anatomy and disease differ categorically from questions of how and when a child should become sexually active.

Beyond issues of content and different moral views is the question of who is teaching. The family, not the government or teachers, is best placed to raise children. Parents make informed decisions on how to raise their children in the context of a deep emotional and relational connection—connections that teachers can’t have to the same extent. Parents may raise their children imperfectly, but they remain best placed to decide when, where and how children receive sex education.

Provincial governments can create sex ed curriculum. It should be done in consultation with parents and provided to parents so they can continue to direct the education of the child. But the nature of the subject matter and the primary responsibility of parents make it paramount that parents can choose whether their children receive such teaching in school.

pam krause says yes

President and CEO of the Calgary-based Centre for Sexuality

The Centre for Sexuality has been serving parents, children and families in Alberta for 52 years. Our decades of experience have shown that sexual health and well-being are inextricably linked to overall health. Comprehensive sexual health education gives students vital information about their bodies, development and growth, and about important health matters such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). It also helps youth learn about healthy relationships, providing skills and tools around communication, decision-making and consent. All of these are essential elements in the reduction of gender-based violence.

Youth are exposed to a plethora of inaccurate and harmful information. The aim of our comprehensive sexual health education program is to help them navigate developmental changes and build knowledge, skills and motivation to make informed, healthy choices about their bodies, relationships and sexuality. Our three interconnected core components are sexual and reproductive health information, healthy relationship education, and sexual violence prevention/consent skills promotion. All of this is informed by research and evidence.

We know that parents are essential sexual health educators for children and that they can and should have conversations with their children about what they’re learning at school, no matter the subject. In fact, a conversation between parent and child in preparation for, or after, sex ed is a great opportunity to discuss family values. For example, what are the family expectations around dating, social media use etc.?

Without mandatory comprehensive sex education in schools, however, students simply don’t receive the consistent and comprehensive information to achieve healthy bodies and healthy relationships. Educators provide facts, foster critical thinking, promote respect, broaden students’ perspectives and prepare young people for the complexities of adult life. Courses in sexual health—just like biology, social studies and other core classes—play a vital role in building these skills. Mandatory sexual health education also ensures that all students have access to evidence-based information from trained educators, regardless of how conversations about sex are approached at home. Not all parents are comfortable with topics related to sexuality, and some don’t have accurate information themselves.

The benefits are clear. When youth receive quality sexual health education from professionals, they are likely to delay their first sexual experience and have lower rates of unplanned pregnancies and STIs. Sex education contributes to the prevention of intimate-partner and sexual violence. And youth who receive comprehensive sexual health education are more likely to communicate with their parents about relationships and sexuality. So sexual health education in schools isn’t about keeping parents out. It’s actually about increasing the odds that parents will be part of the conversation in the first place.

daniel zekveld responds to pam krause

Pam Krause argues for mandatory sex education, using the Centre for Sexuality’s standards as the example of what it should look like. The problem is that Canadians have different ideas about what should be taught. Mandatory sex education inevitably goes beyond basic facts. Many parents aren’t bothered by the idea of sex education per se but by allowing strangers to decide what to teach their children about sex.

Sex education means different things to different people. “Comprehensive sex education,” which covers not just the basic science of reproductive systems but also sexual relationships and decision-making, is inevitably value-laden, as is “abstinence education.” And within both there is diversity of thought and opinion.

One educator might say or imply that some types of sexual activity or relationships are inappropriate, while another might say anything goes if it’s consensual. Perhaps one educator is anti-abortion or says gender cannot be changed, while another says abortion is a legitimate response to unplanned pregnancy or that gender is fluid. Aside from value judgments, an educator might emphasize or neglect facts about certain sexual acts being riskier than others.

Choosing which topics to cover or emphasize (or not) is a value-laden proposition. As such, parents rightly want to know what their children are learning. Well-informed parents might choose to send their children to sex education at school because it aligns with their moral views and they trust how the teacher will present the information. Alternatively, they might choose to opt their child out (or not opt in) and provide sex education themselves. Governments shouldn’t prohibit them from doing so.

Krause is right that children are often exposed to “inaccurate and harmful information” and that good sex education helps to achieve positive outcomes. But Canadians’ views on “good sex education” will differ. Further, Krause hasn’t shown that good outcomes cannot be achieved without mandatory sex education.

A government that makes sex ed mandatory is inevitably choosing one approach and imposing it on everyone.

Of course, many children are exposed to harmful information. For example, many are (mis)taught about sex by pornography. That can be a major problem for families to contend with. Pornography contributes to higher rates of youth sexual activity and sexual violence. Sex education may be helpful in combatting elements of this, although educators will have differing moral perspectives on porn as well. So again, mandatory sex ed isn’t the answer. A child’s relationship with friends and family is more important than a standardized curriculum in shaping a child’s ideas about healthy sexuality and relationships. A child’s communication and relationship with mother and father is especially important.

Parents who keep their children out of sex education in school are typically those who think carefully about the issues, believe sex belongs within a context of committed relationships, and want to have a relationship with their children that includes conversations about sex. Mandatory sex education wrongly assumes that such parents will fail to educate their child.

Krause says mandatory sex education increases the likelihood that parents will have such conversations with their children. But it’s doubtful that parents who wouldn’t have these conversations if sex ed were optional will have them if it is mandatory. Mandatory sex ed might instead foster a culture in which people see the state rather than parents as responsible for teaching kids about sex. Ultimately, parents get involved because they care about what their children learn about sex.

Krause admits parents are essential sexual health educators but would mandate that they entrust their children to trained educators to learn about sex “regardless of how conversations about sex are approached at home.” But the default shouldn’t be to give the responsibility of sex ed to teachers. Mandatory sex ed denies the authority of parents to direct the education of their children, particularly as it pertains to the child’s moral upbringing.

When it comes to raising children and having difficult conversations, parents are the experts. Not necessarily because parents know all the facts and data, but because parents know their children best and have the closest relationship with them. Sex education is important. And parents remain best placed to decide when, where and how children receive such education.

Like many parents, I have my own ideas of what would be best included in sex ed curricula. I imagine that Krause would disagree with some of my ideas, and vice versa. A government that makes sex education mandatory inevitably chooses one approach to sex education and imposes it on everyone. The better solution is to respect the responsibility of parents to choose whether sex education happens at home or school.

pam krause responds to daniel zekveld

The question of whether governments should mandate sex education in schools or make it opt-in is often framed as a matter of parental rights and authority. What’s being lost in all the rhetoric is the government’s responsibility to ensure that children receive a comprehensive education that prepares them for life in the real world.

While parental involvement in sex education is important (and often times preferred), so is the necessity of making it mandatory in our schools.

The argument that sexual health education should be treated differently than other core subjects such as math or social studies minimizes the positive impact that comprehensive sexual health education has throughout life. Evidence shows that when youth learn about how to communicate, make decisions and understand consent, sexual activity is actually delayed and youth increase their knowledge of how to prevent intimate-partner violence.

I acknowledge the importance of parental involvement; however, it’s essential to strike a balance between respecting parental authority and addressing the broader public interest. Provincial governments, responsible for creating sex education curricula, should actively consult with parents to ensure their perspectives are considered. However, making sex education a choice will leave some students inadequately prepared for the complexities of relationships and sexual health.

Parental involvement and effective parent–child communication about sexual health is ideal but in reality it frequently doesn’t occur or is inadequate. Many parents don’t engage in discussions about sexual health, because of their own limited knowledge, uncertainty about what information is appropriate for different age groups or general discomfort or unease with the topic.

As a result, many parents avoid conversations about sexual health altogether or wait until their children initiate discussions. When children do ask questions, parents may respond with brief answers or quickly shut down the conversation.

Parental involvement and communication about sexual health is ideal but in reality frequently doesn’t occur.

Sex education has evolved in Canada. It reflects changes in societal norms, values and health concerns. Alberta’s decision to make sex education opt-in may appear to respect parents’ moral views, but it runs the risk of inadequately preparing children for the challenges of the modern world. The expansion of sex education beyond biology and disease prevention reflects the evolving understanding of human relationships and contributes to the holistic development of individuals.

The ongoing controversy over sex education content and delivery reflects the diverse perspectives within our society. While some parents advocate for an emphasis on abstinence, many support a more comprehensive approach. The lack of consensus on the “right” way to teach this subject underscores the need for a standardized curriculum that incorporates various perspectives while prioritizing the well-being and education of all students.

The argument that parents are best placed to raise children and make decisions about their education assumes that the family environment is universally equipped to provide accurate information or is comfortable doing so. But the reality is that families vary greatly in their ability to address sensitive topics such as sex education. Professional educators can offer a broader perspective, ensuring children receive accurate information and fostering an environment where questions are welcomed without judgment.

There’s no denying that parental involvement is a key part of com-prehensive sexual health education. Research shows that youth want to discuss sexuality and sexual health with their parents, yet often parents feel ill equipped.

At the Centre for Sexuality, we strive to provide parents with the skills to engage in conversations whenever their child wants to talk. We organize parent nights at schools, where parents can meet our educators and familiarize themselves with the topics and activities covered. Parents can even participate alongside their children.

Our aim isn’t to take over the role of parents. Rather, comprehensive sexual health education serves as the foundation for future discussion and parental guidance. Parents reinforcing family values and facilitating open discussions on complex topics are essential aspects of healthy development for children and youth.

While parents should be consulted in the development of curricula, leaving sex education as an opt-in choice risks compromising children’s comprehensive education and well-being. Striking a balance between parental involvement and societal needs is crucial to ensure that all children receive the knowledge and skills necessary for navigating the complexities of the modern world.

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What is curriculum and how does it prepare students for an unknowable future The Alberta government defines curriculum as “values, learning foundations and outcomes for Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.” In the past the process of writing and revising curriculum was generally straightforward, the work done by public servants in consultation with curricular and subject experts. That process hasn’t changed. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious—particularly social studies. Everything gets argued about in public, from who should be consulted on the curriculum, to what schools should teach, to the emphasis given to various material, to the sequence it’s taught in, to which grades to teach different ideas at, and then, finally—no small consideration—what students are asked to do with the material they’re given.

Under Hancock, the goal of revising curriculum was to present “a vision for education to 2030.” Those days of optimism would sour. Drafts of the new curriculum were criticized for emphasizing job skills over critical thinking. In March 2014 the Edmonton Journal broke news that an advisory panel for the new K–3 curriculum would include Syncrude, Suncor and Cenovus. NDP MLA Deron Bilous compared this to Scholastic’s failed 2011 effort in the US to take money from coal lobbyists and publish pro-coal education material. The news only reinforced public skepticism. Alberta’s curriculum process was tainted.

When an NDP government came to power, its goal was similar to Hancock’s. “The world is changing,” said then-minister of education David Eggen, restarting the curriculum process in 2016. “We know that the 21st century career involves using critical thinking skills… to process information, to access it and make evaluations on those higher levels.” Eggen consulted with eight subject-area working groups of about 400 people. The opposition UCP, however, decried the government’s eventual draft curriculum for, among other things, its “political correctness” and “absence” of military history. Then-leader Jason Kenney said if he became premier he’d “put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.”

In the past the process was generally straightforward. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious.

Alberta’s leadership soon changed again, and the curriculum process restarted again, then slowed to a crawl, bogged down in controversy and disillusionment. The working groups were abandoned. New consultants were brought in. In March 2021 Kenney unveiled a new curriculum for all K–6 subjects. His draft was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created. The revised social studies curriculum, in particular, was pilloried. Large chunks of it appeared to have been plagiarized. The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations called it a “Eurocentric, American-focused, Christian-dominant narrative” that “perpetuates rather than addresses systemic racism.” Almost every school board in the province refused to pilot any of the new curriculum. Once more we were back to the drawing board.

In April 2022 Alberta Education released revised K–6 curriculum for math, English language arts and literature, and physical education and wellness. In March 2023 the ministry followed up with revised curriculum for science and French. Some boards announced they were prepared to let their schools pilot these curricula over the 2023–2024 school year on a voluntary basis. But social studies remained under wraps, a work in progress being assembled by civil servants under the watch of UCP education minister Adriana LaGrange and, from June 2023 onward, Demetrios Nicolaides.

In the fall of that year Alberta Education set up three groups—curriculum development specialists (“the specialists”), curriculum content contributors (“content contributors”) and teacher curriculum consultation (“teachers”)—to “inform” the continued development of social studies. The specialists were academics with expertise in pedagogy and curriculum, including Kathryn Crawford, Ambrose University; Meyranie Giroux, Conseil Scolaire Centre-Nord; J-C Couture, University of Alberta; Pierre Rousseau, Campus St-Jean (U of A); Craig Harding, Mount Royal University; Amy von Heyking, University of Lethbridge; Yvonne Poitras Pratt, University of Calgary; and David Scott, U of C.

The content contributors worked in political science departments at either the University of Calgary or the University of Alberta, with the exception of Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a lawyer and former president and CEO of the Montreal Economic Institute. The final group was composed of 27 current or retired K–12 teachers. All groups were told the government’s goal was to get a draft ready in time for piloting in the fall of 2024.

What each group did that fall isn’t easy to discern. Terms of reference obtained through a freedom of information request showed the roles and responsibilities for each group were almost identical. All participants were asked to contribute social studies subject matter knowledge according to their particular expertise, review the draft curriculum and provide feedback, and engage in online and in-person “working sessions.” All group members were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. The teachers were given one additional requirement: “Be curriculum champions throughout the curriculum development and implementation process.”

Only after their engagement with Alberta Education was over and a revised draft had been made public in March 2024 did members of the specialists group speak out. In an open letter they said they were “deeply disappointed” to discover that their input had been ignored. They deplored the curriculum’s “failure to define key social studies concepts… such as critical thinking, citizenship, historical thinking, inquiry and multiple perspectives,” the limited opportunities it offered for critical thinking, and the tokenistic gesture made toward Alberta’s diversity generally and First Nations, Métis and Inuit worldviews and perspectives specifically. “An absence of clear purpose has created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision,” they wrote. “Instead of a program that inspires hope and possibility for engaging the pressing issues of our world, this draft is an exhausting and unwieldy roadmap to a better version of yesterday.” In conclusion, they said the government must start over.

One of the authors of that letter was Couture, an adjunct lecturer of education at U of A. “The current programs bolted together just don’t work,” he said in March 2024. “The idea under Minister Hancock in 2010 was ‘less is more.’ We need to cut down on the content [i.e., facts] and focus on skills and competencies. That never happened.”

In an interview that March with CBC, Couture said it looked like the government had made token attempts to integrate pedagogical and curricular experts’ feedback. “Unfortunately, it’s a case of lifting key words and phrases and inserting them into what the government was planning to do anyway, which is still a very knowledge-based curriculum,” he said. “Knowledge-based” might sound good—but the approach, he said, is overwhelming. “How can you claim that you’re going to have time to do critical thinking and inquiry… when I am, as a Grade 6 student, being trotted through 100 knowledge items on the history of democracy, going back to ancient Greece and Rome and the evolution of the Magna Carta?

Carla Peck, a professor of social studies education at the U of A, says she spoke with Jennifer Cassidy, assistant deputy minister for Alberta Education, in October 2023, and was told that the draft curriculum was already complete. Nevertheless, that fall the ministry conducted a general survey, eventually completed by “more than 12,800” Albertans, about what people would like to see in the new social studies. The fact that a draft was complete wasn’t explained. From September 2023 to January 2024, ministry officials met with teachers, multicultural organizations, Indigenous and francophone communities and other education specialists for a series of curriculum consultations to supplement feedback from the three working groups. Yet very few of these people were actually allowed to see the draft. It’s unclear what their advice was, or whether it was taken into consideration.

At a glance, draft curricula from different Alberta governments generally have a common look. All subjects, from social studies to math to physical education, are presented in the form of a table. In the NDP government’s 2018 draft, for example, the table was organized into guiding questions, learning outcomes, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and competencies. An “essential understanding” spans Kindergarten to Grade 4. The UCP government’s drafts are similarly organized, with slightly different categories: organizing ideas, guiding questions, learning outcomes, knowledge, understanding, and skills and procedures.

The criticism of Alberta’s recent social studies drafts generally starts with their framework. Lindsay Gibson is an assistant professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Back in 2017 he was an assistant professor in social studies education at the U of A and part of Alberta Education’s curriculum-writing group—until he resigned in November 2018. His resignation letter to minister Eggen was critical of many aspects of the draft curriculum, but particularly the framework, also described as the “architecture.” “Alberta Education has been unwilling to make even the slightest changes to the framework even when presented with evidence that it isn’t helping teachers write learning outcomes that are clear and purposeful,” he wrote.

Gibson argued that the 2018 framework failed to present a “coherent understanding of history and geography,” adding that Alberta’s existing K–12 curriculum was already ranked last among all provinces and territories by Historica Canada for how well it addressed Canadian history and citizenship. (Historica is a national charity best known for its “Heritage Minute” ads and for publishing The Canadian Encyclopedia.) Eggen’s revised curriculum was unlikely to fare better, Gibson wrote, describing it as “far too present-focused.”

His criticisms echo how Alberta’s specialist group in spring 2024 decried the UCP government draft’s lack of an overarching vision. In their case, however, they saw in the framework too much emphasis on the past and too little on the present—a focus “largely on learning outcomes that do not ask students to think critically about events and issues in our world today.”

The main difference between NDP-era and UCP-era curricula is perhaps hinted at by these overarching frameworks. Eggen’s draft, for example, contains this high-level “essential understanding”: “Active citizenship contributes to the vitality of communities that can promote pluralism among diverse people in a democratic society.” In the UCP government’s 2021 draft, “essential understandings” had become “organizing ideas,” and many of them are longer, for example: “Understanding the history of our province, nation and world and developing cultural literacy allow us to appreciate the varied richness of our shared human inheritance of original writings, artifacts, stories, beliefs, ideas and great cultural and artistic achievements from different times and places. Lessons of the past and knowledge of diverse experiences help us overcome ignorance and prejudice and recognize our common humanity and dignity.”

Peck shared the specialist group’s concern about the UCP draft’s overarching emphasis on lessons of the past. “In this curriculum, ‘knowledge’ just means facts,” she wrote on her blog. “In history education… powerful knowledge means more than the mere accumulation of facts and dates… It also includes helping students learn how knowledge is created.”

Other criticisms of the curriculum rewriting process have included how one subject integrates with others taught at the same grade level. Peck, for example, argued that the April 2024 Social Studies draft won’t inform other subjects. “The argument behind having a common architecture [across curricula] is that it’s supposed to make it easier for teachers to do cross-curricular planning,” she said in an interview. “When they’re looking at the science [curriculum] and they’re looking at social studies, they can see connections.” But the authors of this draft “haven’t actually done a comparative analysis of what students are being asked to learn in math in Grade 3 and social studies in Grade 3 to make sure that the concepts are actually aligned.”

As an example, Peck referred to the learning outcome in the draft that requires Grade 2 students to “explore ways trade and taxation support local communities.” Specifically, the “knowledge” section expects students to learn that governments collect money through taxes, which is used to provide services such as police, healthcare and education. Peck argued this isn’t an age-appropriate expectation. “In math, they haven’t yet developed the number sense to make sense of these things.” She added, on her blog, “The concept of ‘government’ is too abstract for kids of this age.”

John, an assistant principal and teacher at a southside Edmonton K–6 school (who asked that I not use his real name), agreed. “To talk about the specifics of taxation policies and what the municipal government is responsible for—that’s stuff I’m having problems with [in] Grade 6 every year,” he said. When asked if the revised curriculum has an overall coherence, John laughed. “I think [we] used to have that in the old curriculum.” He says topics have become “mixed up” and “moved all over the place.”

This latter criticism seems borne out by comparing UCP drafts. The 2021 curriculum, for example, asked that Grade 2 students learn about the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who went from Italy to China, visited the court of Kublai Khan and travelled along the famous Silk Road, a vast trading route. This was listed in the “knowledge” column of the table, underneath a heading called “encounters with other worlds.” Over in the corresponding “skills and procedures” column, students were asked to “retell the story of Marco Polo’s journey to the Orient and back, and what he discovered in the Far East.” But in the 2024 draft the story of Marco Polo had disappeared entirely. This invites the question: If Marco Polo’s voyage had been considered essential content just a couple of years before, why was it now omitted It gives credence to the charge that this curriculum lacks a guiding rationale.

Peck also worried the revised curriculum left little room for student inquiry. The government “has clearly [indicated] whatever answer they think is the most appropriate for the guiding question and the learning outcome,” she said. Because of that, the curriculum “is very prescriptive.”

In 2021 Jason Kenney’s new curriculum was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created.

Much criticism of the UCP’s March 2024 draft curriculum and earlier drafts alike involves their treatment of First Peoples. The 2018 version unveiled by Eggen, for example, with mandatory lessons on residential school history, colonialism and treaties, was dismissed for its “political correctness”; the 2021 draft issued by Kenney was deemed dismissive of Indigenous people and was at worst “racist.” Dwayne Donald, the Canada Research Chair in Reimagining Teacher Education with Indigenous Wisdom Traditions, said the process has been frustrating. “The way in which we argue about what should be in there is a distraction that serves the needs of the government,” he says. “We need to create a vision… about how to understand ourselves in relation to each other, how to understand ourselves in relation to the life all around us.”

Donald believes the latest curriculum continues to lack a unifying vision for how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people could live together. “We have treaties, and they’re sacred covenants, and they have been a massive curricular omission in our country.”

On April 26, 2024, minister Nicolaides held a press conference to announce that the curriculum had been revised yet again. The previous draft had been criticized for its reliance on lower-order verbs in the skills and procedures category, which Peck had argued encouraged less cognitive complexity and demanded less intellect and creativity of students. Among those verbs, many fell into the category of “remember.” Peck had found numerous verbs in the March 2024 draft that were stand-ins for “remember,” in particular “describe” and “identify.” But this revised draft had higher-order verbs including “evaluate” and “create,” indicating skills of greater complexity. In a briefing following the press conference, Alberta Education said that “verbs used in skills and procedures have been strengthened to encourage critical thinking.”

The revised curriculum had other tweaks. The changes reduced what some critics had seen as a too-heavy load and too much focus on memorization, and rearranged content to be more age-appropriate. Taxation, previously introduced at Grade 2 in the draft released just one month previously, would now be discussed for the first time in Grade 5.

Among the notable changes revealed in April were additional First Nations, Métis, Inuit and francophone histories, contributions and perspectives. But while the curriculum’s focus on First Nations, Inuit and Métis had expanded from the 2021 draft to the 2024 version, omissions remained. Nowhere in the new curriculum are K–6 students expected to learn about residential schools. This is despite the Truth and Reconciliation’s Call to Action 62(i), which calls on provinces to “make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade 12 students.” Nicolaides said that some apparent omissions “relate to content in junior high and high school. So obviously, we haven’t developed that content. [But] I’m sure we’ll be able to address that.”

The Alberta Teachers’ Association had panned the March 2024 draft and wasn’t reassured by the April revision. In May the ATA called for the curriculum process to be paused. “We welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback… unfortunately, teachers’ recommendations aren’t reflected in this most recent draft,” said ATA president Jason Schilling. “Rather than proceeding to pilot a curriculum that we know is flawed, let’s take the time needed to get it right.” Among teachers’ unresolved concerns, he said, are a still-unrealistic number of concepts, some of which remain “developmentally inappropriate and conceptually inaccurate,” as well as a persistent failure to engage higher-order thinking skills.

Paul (not his real name), an elementary school teacher in Grande Prairie, is concerned that the latest revision still provides no guidance on how social studies classes should approach current events. This is quite unlike the 2005 program of study, which states that “the infusion of current events, issues and concerns is an essential component of social studies.” That version describes how to use current events as a teaching tool.

Paul speculates that the omission of current events from the 2024 draft is a result of a new code of professional conduct for teachers that took effect in January 2023 (and is now enforced by the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission, not the ATA). Under this code, a teacher may not teach in a manner that exploits their “ideological advantage.” By this, the government says, it means “perspectives taught to students in a biased manner with the intent to take advantage of a student’s uninformed or under-informed opinions.” Ministry staff say a similar provision is in effect in BC, and that the intent is “to make sure teachers and teacher leaders do not exploit students for material, ideological or other advantage while in a position of authority.” In Paul’s view, with the new code in effect and no guidance from the curriculum, “teachers could be nervous” about using news stories as opportunities to make learning more relevant.

A lack of clear purpose in 2024 “created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision.”

Minister Nicolaides seemed to believe the 14-year process of revising Alberta’s social studies curriculum was finally making some headway. “I think our approach has been to take politics out of the classroom and give students a deep understanding of history, to understand an evolving and complex world, and give students the skills that they need to be successful,” he said at the April press conference.

He may have been too optimistic. A week later, at a May 3 debate in Edmonton between the (then) five candidates seeking the NDP leadership, all said the UCP government had irrevocably politicized the development and content of social studies. All five pledged to start the process over if they become premier. “We’ve got to ditch this curriculum,” said Naheed Nenshi. “You have my pledge that I will put experts back at the front of that process,” said Sarah Hoffman. The way we should rewrite curriculum, said Gil McGowan, “is by handing it over to professionals, including teachers, doing it on a regular cycle instead of all at once, providing a proper amount of time for piloting and development.”

Alberta’s new social studies curriculum will be piloted in nine school boards in September 2024. While it’s possible that more tweaks will have been made, the April 2024 version is likely the one that will be rolled out provincewide in fall 2025. That is, until it’s scrapped, and we start the process all over again.

Laurence Miall is the author of Blind Spot (NeWest Press, 2014) and writes on politics and culture for various publications.

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And so, when the UCP came to power in 2019, they brought with them their paper shredders and nutcrackers. In August of that year, Minister of Education Adriana LaGrange halted the curriculum development work that had been underway for almost 10 years and appointed a new Curriculum Advisory Panel. The 12-member panel included business leaders, administrators of colleges and technical institutes (but no universities) and three professors of education, although only one of these had scholarly expertise in K–12 curriculum theory and policy. Most egregiously, K–12 teachers were left off the panel. LaGrange had torn up a memorandum of understanding between the government and the Alberta Teachers’ Association that had been put in place under the NDP government. The agreement had formalized the role of the ATA as a partner in curriculum development: Teachers were to be included in every step of the process, from advice to conceptualization to development to pilot testing and implementation.

The Curriculum Advisory Panel submitted its report to LaGrange on December 20, 2019, and a new Ministerial Order on Student Learning came into effect on August 6, 2020. Such an order outlines official government policy and direction for matters related to student learning broadly and curriculum specifically. To give a flavour of the differences between the previous ministerial order and LaGrange’s, consider these two excerpts:

“Whereas education in Alberta will be shaped by a greater emphasis on inquiry, discovery and the application of knowledge than on the dissemination of information.” (2013)

Students “will inherit a rich, interconnected knowledge base.” (2019)

The word “inherit” is significant. It implies there is a body of knowledge that students need to receive and does not leave room for student interests or curiosities. This is characteristic of a philosophy of curriculum development that emphasizes universal truths and diminishes the importance of student prior knowledge, experience, choice and interest. Ultimately, it was Kenney’s strong beliefs about the purpose of education that influenced this policy shift. In rejecting the 2013 ministerial order, which had been implemented by a Progressive Conservative government, Kenney was determined to rid the education system of “failed teaching fads” and end the focus on “so-called discovery or constructivist learning.”

Students’ minds aren’t blank slates. Teachers need to do more than crack open a student’s head and deposit knowledge into it. 

What knowledge is of most worth? This question, memorably asked by Herbert Spencer in 1860, lies at the heart of curriculum design. It refers to the choices curriculum developers must make about what knowledge to include and what knowledge to exclude in the official programs of study for Kindergarten to Grade 12. Answers to this question are, of course, a value judgment, and reveal much about the person or people giving them. In the early 1900s, curriculum scholars such as Franklin Bobbitt argued that the most worthwhile knowledge was that which would prepare students for the needs of society at the time. Bobbitt advised curriculum developers to look to current conditions, most importantly a growing industrial society, and list all the knowledge and skills that would be needed by students to assume their role in society upon completing basic education.

More recently, as societal expectations change around representation and authenticity of the voices and perspectives included in curriculum, the people who shape programs of study must also ask “Whose knowledge is of most worth?” Influences such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action (2015), specifically calls 62–65, urge educators and those responsible for curriculum development in Canada to incorporate more Indigenous perspectives and histories, especially around the legacy of residential schools. Indeed, Senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired the TRC, argued that “education is the key to reconciliation.” Other developments, such as Black Lives Matter and research on teaching culturally diverse students, must also be taken into consideration when deciding whose knowledge should be included in the curriculum.

If the government officially implements this curriculum in Fall 2022, not one school in Alberta will have piloted the entire draft.

Important questions about scope and sequence—how much of and when should something be taught—must be considered, but asking “What and whose knowledge is of most worth?” is where curriculum developers should begin. In my professional experience the focus is still very much on the “what,” with the answer to “whose knowledge” often still assumed (white, Western knowledge is the default) or a matter that curriculum developers are only now beginning to explore.

Kenney’s determination to end “discovery” or “constructivist” learning reveals his lack of understanding of basic educational concepts. First, constructivism is a theory of learning, not a method of teaching. Constructivism is based on the idea that learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information. It acknowledges that students come into any learning situation with prior knowledge and experiences that shape future learning. It posits that students actively work to integrate new knowledge with knowledge they already have. That is, this theory acknowledges that students’ minds aren’t blank slates and that in order to learn, students need to do more than crack open their head so that teachers can deposit knowledge into it. 

Second, while it’s true that a teacher’s particular theoretical orientation can guide the approaches they use in the classroom, constructivism doesn’t dictate that one teaching strategy be used above all others. Indeed, students construct understandings through a variety of teaching and learning strategies, including reading, listening to a teacher or guest speaker, discussing concepts and problems with peers, independent work, direct instruction and group work, among others. Teachers use their professional judgment to decide which approach will work best for the concepts they’re teaching, and for their students.

Third, neither discovery nor inquiry learning means that students are free to roam the classroom thinking about whatever they want while the teacher sits at their desk drinking coffee. A good teaching approach allows for variations in methods but ultimately helps students achieve the aims set out in the curriculum.

Thus, this UCP policy shift, which is both ideologically driven (“break the nut” of collectivist ideas among youth) and based on misunderstandings of foundational educational concepts, has led to the development of a draft K–6 curriculum that has been widely criticized both in Alberta and internationally.

There is no doubt Alberta’s curriculum required updating. Some areas, such as Art, hadn’t been updated since the 1980s. That document advised teachers to use overhead projectors and laserdiscs. Other curricular areas had been updated in 2005–2010 (Social Studies) and 2015 (Language Arts and Literacy). While not as dated, this material nonetheless required revisiting given a growing consciousness in Canada about the TRC and social movements such as Idle No More, Black Lives Matter and climate action, not to mention current research on how children and youth learn.

Following the August 2020 release of the new ministerial order on student learning, LaGrange chose eight people to create a draft of the K–6 curriculum, in all subject areas. Once again, teachers were excluded. She also disbanded the province’s eight curriculum working groups assembled by the former NDP government, which had included 358 teachers and other experts. LaGrange’s all-male committee was later expanded to 19 members following public criticism of the lack of women and Indigenous representation. Of the 19 appointees, only one was a professor who specialized in curriculum. Two other professors were specialists in psychology, particularly as it relates to literacy development. Some of the remaining advisers had disciplinary expertise in areas such as computing science, math or history.

Revelations soon emerged about Chris Champion, initially the only social studies adviser. Champion, a former staffer to Kenney (when he was an MP) and the editor of a fringe conservative history magazine, has published commentary downplaying the deaths of 215 children at a former residential school in Kamloops (e.g., “most of the children likely died of disease (meaning they were not murdered).” In a 2019 article, “Alberta’s Little History Wars,” Champion argued that including Indigenous perspectives in curriculum is a “fad.” He refers to the KAIROS blanket exercise, a workshop designed to help teachers and students better understand Indigenous–settler relations (including “pre-contact, treaty-making, colonization and resistance”), as “deplorable agit-prop” that “brainwashes children into thinking of themselves as ‘settlers’ stealing the land.” After these revelations, a second social studies adviser was added sometime before February 2021.

These curriculum advisers worked into the fall, and in December 2020 a draft was ready for preliminary review. At that time, 102 teachers and 30 professors of education were given between two and eight days to review the draft and provide feedback. This was the only time that teachers and a wide group of academics with expertise in curriculum were included in the process—i.e., after the draft had been written. I was one of the professors who gave feedback (I focused on social studies); I was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement and therefore cannot discuss the December 2020 drafts.

At the end of March 2021 the draft K–6 curriculum was released to the public. It was immediately criticized. Tens of thousands of Albertans have since protested Kenney’s insistence on moving forward with a fundamentally flawed curriculum. In April the Alberta Curriculum Analysis website launched (full disclosure: I spearheaded its development and am a steering committee member); more than 70 academics and other curriculum and subject-matter experts have published detailed critiques in every subject area. Indigenous organizations including the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations Chiefs, the Athabasca Tribal Council, the Métis Nation of Alberta, the Kainai Board of Education and the Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission rejected the draft curriculum. Elders said their perspective is absent and the draft curriculum treats them as “token Indian[s].” Other groups panned the draft as assimilationist, racist and omitting LGBTQ+ perspectives.

Lastly, 56 of Alberta’s 61 school boards (responsible for the education of 95 per cent of students in Alberta) have refused to pilot the draft curriculum, citing a combination of concerns about its poor quality and not wishing to impose a new curriculum during a pandemic. Four remaining boards agreed only to pilot certain subjects, none of them social studies. Westwind School Division, based in Cardston, announced only that “individual teachers who wish to pilot a particular subject… will be permitted to do so.”

This means that, should the government officially implement this curriculum in Fall 2022, not one school in Alberta will have piloted the entire draft.

All of this is a stark deviation from the previous curriculum development process in Alberta. Between 2008 and 2015 the PC government engaged thousands of Albertans, public and expert alike, in a province-wide consultation known as “Inspiring Education,” with a goal of creating a vision for public education in Alberta through to 2030. In 2016 the NDP picked up where the PCs left off, focusing on K–4 curriculum first. A first step was to form curriculum writing groups and teacher and educator focus groups for each subject area. Both groups had 300 people spread across six subject areas (50–60 per area: math, English/language arts, science, social studies, fine arts, wellness) to write and review the curriculum across its various stages of development. Had the NDP remained in government, the same process was going to be used for Grades 5–9 and 10–12.

Many curriculum specialists, particularly those in faculties of education, spend whole careers in their respective fields researching how children learn.

Far more people were involved in this process than under the UCP approach. The composition of the group creating curriculum was different too. Given the ATA’s memorandum of understanding with the NDP government solidifying its role as a partner in curriculum development, the NDP’s groups were comprised of public school teachers (40 per cent) and separate school teachers (16 per cent), with both of these groups including Indigenous teachers. The rest were francophone school teachers (5 per cent), First Nations school teachers (3 per cent), private and charter school teachers (2 per cent), post-secondary professors, including disciplinary and curriculum experts (8 per cent), Alberta Education staff (responsible for organizing and running meetings: 19 per cent) and other organizations (7 per cent), including members of the governments of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, jurisdictions that have, until now, used some of Alberta’s curriculum. Representatives from the NWT have recently suggested that the UCP’s vision for education does not align with their own and they might look elsewhere for curriculum.

Between 2016 and 2018 numerous in-person engagement sessions were held with a wide range of stakeholders including the ATA, school authorities, teachers, students, parents and First Nations, Métis, Inuit and francophone Albertans. Various organizations led these sessions, including school boards and Alberta’s Professional Development Consortia. In these sessions, paper copies of the draft curricula were shared and discussed and feedback was gathered. Hundreds of Albertans participated in these sessions. 

Other forms of engagement included public surveys about the draft documents. The NDP published all of the raw data from a survey in fall 2016 which gathered comments from more than 32,000 citizens. Anyone with internet access could see the spreadsheet and know who responded (teacher, student, parent etc.) as well as their answers to the survey questions. Other survey results were collated by Alberta Education and independent firms and published online. Overall, between 50,000 and 100,000 Albertans provided feedback over several years, a curriculum development process Jason Kenney now characterizes as having been done “in secret.”

The NDP government’s decision to involve 100 or more people to develop a single curriculum area is unusual for Canada. Much smaller groups (often somewhere between 15 and 20 people per subject area and level—elementary, junior high and high school—not including reviewers, consultations with experts etc.) are more typical, although these usually include a diversity of voices, either from committee members or consultants. Regardless of the group size, including multiple voices is critical and is preferable to the UCP approach—only one or two disciplinary experts and almost no curriculum or K–12 specialists involved in shaping the curriculum.

One person (of even two) is unlikely to know everything there is to know about a given aspect of curriculum. Relying on one person for advice means narrowing the scope of expertise. That person might even be top in their field, but the very nature of specialization means one person can’t know everything. For example, I specialize in history and citizenship education. I don’t specialize in geography, anthropology, political science or sociology. So, if I had been asked to consult on the social studies curriculum, I’d have been well equipped to provide direction on the history and civics sections, but on the other areas, not so much.

Many voices should be at the table. For example, disciplinary specialists have an important place in curriculum design. They provide insight into the central questions in their respective fields, and into the theories and methods about how knowledge is produced in those fields. A historian provides crucial information about what historical topics and questions are important and worthy of study. Historians also shed light on how members of their profession go about their craft, e.g., through analyzing evidence, evaluating progress and decline, determining causes and consequences
and so on.

A disciplinary specialist, however, is unlikely to understand how young children learn or what learning progression looks like through the grades. Skills and concepts grow out of the academic disciplines but need to be developed for children. Many curriculum specialists, particularly those based in faculties of education, spend whole careers in their respective fields researching how children learn. These understandings are domain-specific; knowledge in science differs from knowledge in history, for example. It’s vital that curriculum developers understand these differences.

Other groups, including teachers, students and representatives of Indigenous, francophone, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, also need to be at the table. All of these bring essential knowledge to the curriculum development process. For example, teachers know how to reach students with diverse learning needs. They understand what’s appropriate in terms of students’ development and what’s possible within a typical school day and year. Representation from marginalized groups ensure that diverse voices, perspectives and histories become an integral part of the program of studies. Decades of sociocultural research in education has demonstrated the importance of ensuring that all students can see themselves in the curriculum they encounter in school.

And although students are directly impacted, they are often left out of the curriculum development process altogether—an issue that should be rectified.

While parents, caregivers and business leaders usually aren’t experts in curriculum, they are experts in the children in their lives and in the characteristics they value in their employees. Representatives of parent school councils and chambers of commerce should be invited to present to the curriculum-writing teams and be part of the ensuing public consultation. While it’s impossible to integrate all feedback, developers can look for common themes and/or glaring errors or omissions that can then
be addressed.

Lastly, while the curriculum is being piloted, ideally across a range of grades and contexts, more feedback will be generated from teachers, students, principals, families, school-board-based curriculum consultants and people who work exclusively with exceptional learners. With all of the feedback gathered, the curriculum-writing teams return to the table and adjust as required. Then, and only then, should a curriculum be finalized. It may still require some tweaking after a few years of implementation—it’s important to continue to gather feedback and adjust as necessary.

In developing curriculum, the most important question—even moreso than “what knowledge” or “whose knowledge”—is What kind of society do we want? If we want a future that looks the same as what we have now, then we can follow Franklin Bobbitt’s model and study elements of society—jobs, laws, societal norms etc.—and develop long lists of knowledge and skills for students to master, the result of which will be graduates who have been taught to maintain the status quo.

But if we want citizens to look for ways to make society more just, to find viable solutions to the challenge of climate change, to develop new ways of tackling as-yet-unknown problems our local, national and global societies will face, then we need to think carefully and deliberately about the kind of education our children need to create a different future.

Carla L. Peck is a professor of social studies education in Elementary Education at the University of Alberta.

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Now Alberta, under the Jason Kenney government, may be about to go even further. In November 2019, at the United Conservative Party AGM in Calgary, the Lacombe-Ponoka constituency association proposed Policy 15. One of several resolutions at that AGM that would influence education, Policy 15 was the most troubling. It called for the implementation of an education voucher that would, among other things, increase public funding to Alberta’s private schools.

Alberta is already unusual in providing public money to private schools; five provinces, including Ontario, give not one cent. And none of the other provinces that subsidize private schools do so to the extent Alberta does. The UCP’s proposed voucher would increase the per student public funding to Alberta’s private schools from 70 per cent of what public schools receive to 100 per cent. The shift would encourage more religious education, more segregation—and more inequality. As Calgary parent Dana Watson says: “Every voucher going to a charter or private pulls money out of the public system and widens the gap of haves and have-nots.”

Proponents of Policy 15 claimed that Alberta’s current education system doesn’t allow enough flexibility for parents and taxpayers dissatisfied with their current public school. They suggested that the current system, in which 92 per cent of Alberta students attend public schools (public, separate/Catholic, francophone or francophone separate), inadequately prepares students for adulthood and radicalizes them with extremist ideology.

Policy 15 passed after some debate. The final policy declaration reads:

“The United Conservative Party believes that the Government of Alberta should

a) ensure equitable per-student funding in accordance with school choice—public, separate, charter, home or private, and

b) implement an education ‘voucher system’ that will provide for equal per-student funding regardless of their school choice, free from caveats or conditions.”

In a voucher system, public dollars follow students to the school of their parents’ choice. The term “voucher” first came into the language of education policy in the 1980s. It was viewed as a way to strengthen parental (a.k.a. individual) rights. That decade—the era of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and free-market economics—saw major changes to political and economic systems, and these influenced education policy.

Economist Milton Friedman was one of the voucher’s first champions. As early as 1962, in Capitalism and Freedom, he proposed that “Parents who choose to send their children to private schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a public school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school.” Friedman and other free-market promoters argued that widespread use of the voucher would result in a competitive market for education, as parents could pick and choose between all types of schools, whether private or public. Parents, promoters reasoned, should be free to spend their own money on top of what they receive from public funds. Just as an individual can choose to buy one consumer product or service over another, they argued that a competitive market for education would result in better schools for everyone.

This ideology of the free market has continued to guide politics and economics across North America and the globe. Bridget Stirling, a Ph.D. candidate and researcher in the University of Alberta’s Department of Educational Policy Studies, says framing education as a consumer purchase diminishes how public services are viewed by the wider society. “People [begin to] think of the state as a service provider, rather than government as something in which we all participate,” she says. Our language changes too, so that “we don’t think of these as public funds for the public good, but instead as tax dollars intended for the provision of service to individuals.”

Alberta was far from immune to the political and economic movements of the 1980s. In fact, the province became a testing ground for many of the concepts pushed by economists like Friedman. Following Ralph Klein’s election win in 1993, free-market ideology became entrenched in provincial public policy. At the time, Alberta was providing 40 per cent of the per pupil amount to private schools. In 1998 “King Ralph” raised private school funding to 60 per cent. In 2008 Ed Stelmach’s government raised it to 70 per cent.

Klein also went far beyond the norm with the introduction of charter schools in 1994. His rationale was to spur innovation and promote competition in the education system. Charters—then and now—receive the same level of per pupil funding as public schools, but are run by private parent or corporate boards. No other province in Canada even has charter schools.

Alexandre Da Costa, associate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Alberta, is concerned about the path our province has chosen. Our money-follows-the-student model “has numbed us to what ‘choice’ in education actually means,” he says. He argues that the forces of privatization, the school-choice movement and religious education have already undermined Alberta’s public schools and the wider society. The full voucher system proposed by Policy 15, he says, would just make things worse.

For example, he argues, private schools provide less democratic oversight. “Control is taken even more out of the hands of the public through further transfer of public goods into the hands of private entities,” Da Costa says. More education is overseen by unelected school boards, such as Strathcona Tweedsmuir’s 14-member board of governors (who implement the school motto Nil Nisi Optimum—“nothing but the best”). And more private and religious influence pervades the classroom (such as at Central Alberta Christian High School, where “…the foundation of Christian education must be based on truth as revealed in God’s infallible word”).

Ironically, the original claim used to justify charter schools to Albertans was that the choice they offered would not only inspire better results in the public system but also fend off private schools. The result in Alberta has been that schools are increasingly exclusive under both the public and private umbrella, and that privatization has only expanded.

Why does any of this matter As Ravitch explains: “Because the American idea, at least until fairly recently, was that the public school was the common school, and the common school was for everybody. It was a way in which children of all different backgrounds and income levels would intermingle. And we were from so many diverse backgrounds and so many different ethnicities, not unlike Canada, frankly. But the idea was, it was a meeting ground for everyone. The way it was put in the 19th century was the child of the banker and the child of workman sit side by side and learn together.”

Erika Shaker, editor of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publication Our Schools/Ourselves, argues that public education is fundamental to Canadian society. The role of government here has been to provide education funding through fair and progressive taxation. Public schools have helped prevent our society from becoming too divided along socioeconomic lines. Our public schools, she adds, “are committed to providing safe, supportive spaces where kids learn from educators and each other, and where differences are opportunities for engagement and building understanding, rather than excuses to divide [or maintain division].”

This doesn’t mean our system ignores individual needs, writes Shaker. “We require a balance between meeting the unique needs of kids while building social and emotional solidarity between them, within the larger project of education, [which includes] caring for the next generation and imagining how to make things better than they are now.”

Shaker is concerned that any public funding is diverted to private schools. She believes public funds should be used only for public schools, because “the moment a profit motive is introduced into education—or [into] anything we have determined to be a public good—it allows the funder to determine who, based on a return on the investment, is deserving of that funding and the service it provides.”

Indeed, commodifying a public good ensures that some citizens get left out. Students with higher needs, those who live in poverty or in remote communities and students from marginalized communities are a liability to the interests of what Shaker terms “efficient investment.” She warns that by providing even more money for private schools, “existing inequities will be enforced.”

Privatization promoters argue that choice and competition create greater equity. But Shaker says this is an empty promise. The evidence—widening income inequality in Canada over the past 30 years correlates with the spread of free market ideology—supports her.

In Alberta, until the 1990s at least, this idea of the common school, the place where children of all backgrounds could come together, was primarily achieved through the community public school. Back then, a community school was typically an Alberta student’s only choice. Since then, the spread of private and charter schools has increased the ways our communities segregate. “Choice in general has a segregating effect,” says Ravitch. “The more choice there is, the more people choose to be with people just like themselves.”

Some of the ways Albertans are choosing to be with people just like themselves include sending their children to schools organized around religion, ability or sport. These restrictions are segregating. And so many Alberta schools are now built around specific commonalities: hockey schools, arts schools, heritage schools, gifted schools, Christian or Jewish or Islamic schools.

Da Costa admits the options can be seductive. “I was initially so excited to see all this choice when I moved with my family to Edmonton in 2015,” he says. “But in the end, my experiences with other parents… have revealed to me how choice promotes not only more aggressive competition to get into the right programs but also a tremendous amount of anxiety among parents about researching, shopping around and choosing the right program.”

Jennifer Berkshire, education author, journalist and host of the education podcast Have You Heard, has observed the same phenomenon in the US, where public school systems try to be responsive to parental demands for more choice. “But the playing field isn’t equal to start with,” she says. “Particular kinds of programs are wildly popular with affluent parents. And so school districts will want to open a Montessori school, and if there’s an income divide in the community—which there always is—that program gets overrun by affluent white parents. Same with language immersion programs.”

Creating more and more choice has also become a way to satisfy religious communities’ desire to prioritize parental rights over children’s rights. Stirling says this instinct overlaps with a distinctly Albertan obsession over property rights. “It’s a connection between a libertarian thread in Alberta, which is [about] property rights and determining what happens with your tax dollars… and a confluence with primarily religious-conservative communities, who want to take their children out of public education because of the things a child might learn or be taught in that system.”

Ultimately, Ravitch says that granting more parental rights incrementally shifts the purpose of education away from the common good. “It’s about a mindset—either I fight for the common good or I fight for consumer choice.”

The UCP’s adoption of policy 15 doesn’t automatically mean the Kenney government will legislate its proposed voucher system and give full funding to Alberta’s private schools. But the trend in this province since the 1990s has been toward more and more funding to private schools, a relentless pursuit of greater choice, and a general disregard for the consequences of segregating students by income, religion, ability or interest.

Says parent Heather Ganshorn: “Vouchers contribute to the kind of class and race segregation that has increased polarization in the US and around the world.” She believes most Albertans would define the purpose of public education similarly to Ravitch’s banker’s son and workman’s son analogy. “Public schools are one of the only places where kids learn that not everyone shares their personal experiences, and that there are kids who are both better off and worse off than they are, kids with different belief systems or family structures. There is value to this experience for all of society, and I think government’s job should be to make funding choices that support the greater social good over the preferences of certain individuals.” 

Carolyn Blasetti is the executive director of Support our Students and a former teacher in Calgary.

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“It means ‘try hard’ in our language,” says Mountain Horse. Big wireless headphones drape around his neck and his hands are covered in some kind of green residue. “I was playing with slime,” he explains. “I can’t sit still. It’s kind of hard for me to concentrate so I just fiddle around with it.” It’s the end of October, 2017, and Mountain Horse is in his last year of high school. He turns 18 in less than a month.

The remote-controlled robot has six wheels and can climb ropes and shoot wiffle balls. It’s stored at the back of Kainai High School’s industrial bay. An array of wood- and metal-working tools occupy one side of the space. Two vintage muscle cars, in various stages of deconstruction, are parked at the back by the bay doors. Out those doors is a parking lot, a playground and then nothing but farmers’ fields and grasslands until the vaulting blue-and-white peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

Learning the connection between trauma and brain development is a way to get to the root of issues.

The Blood Reserve, Canada’s largest reserve area-wise, stretches from just south of Monarch and Lethbridge down to Cardston. Rolling hills provide sweeping views of farms, coulees, creek beds and mountains. Stand Off, the main hub for the community of 12,453 people, is a 20-minute drive south from Fort Macleod. The high school is another 20 minutes south and sits on the reserve’s western boundary.

Mountain Horse credits the extracurricular program and his team, the K-Bots, with the fact he’s on track to graduate in the spring. “It pushed me to stay in school, because back then hard times happened.” He says he began to lose interest in school after his grandfather passed away. Mountain Horse spent some time living with his grandparents and says his grandpa was always the one to challenge and encourage him. “He was my favourite person in the world,” he says. “He taught me how to do a lot of stuff.” Making new friends, travelling to compete in tournaments and the chance to work with his hands are what attracted Mountain Horse to the K-Bots. “Once I joined robotics, it changed everything for me.”

The school day at Kainai begins with walk club at 8:25 a.m. Teenagers in hoodies, skinny jeans and flat-brimmed hats lap the hallways together. “They’re chatting with friends, but walking and releasing some energy, so by the time they are sitting at their desks at 9:00 they are ready to work,” says Charlton Weasel Head, associate principal.

KHS offers dozens of programs, from after-school sports to robotics, tiny-home building and wilderness expeditions. These are designed to snag students’ interest, teach valuable skills and keep kids coming in the door. The school also offers services and resources that provide supports well beyond academics.

The elder-in-residence program started in the fall of 2016. A classroom was converted to a lodge, with a teepee-like structure built in the centre. Blood Tribe elders volunteer at the lodge, listening to students and sharing stories and traditional knowledge. KHS is a place to learn, but it’s also a place to feel safe and feel connected to Blackfoot culture and history.

Weasel Head explains that the cafeteria serves free breakfast and lunch and how, for some students, those might be their only meals that day. “They’re coming to eat, but then they’re also coming to school,” says Weasel Head. “You need to be mindful. You need to have self-care. All these other things around you have to be in place so you can be more focused.”

The dedication to find new and more comprehensive ways of supporting students is why KHS signed its teachers up for an online course in leading-edge neuroscience. Every Wednesday afternoon, from January 2017 to June 2017, teachers at KHS learned about and discussed the connection between trauma and brain development. “It’s another way for us to get to the root of certain issues. There is lots of poverty in our community. There are lots of different dysfunctions,” says Weasel Head. “As educators in our community, we have to be aware—how do we teach fully to students who are dealing with these situations?”

KHS was the first school in the province to take the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative’s (AFWI) brain story course in a coordinated way. “The teachers at Kainai really engaged with the information,” says Nicole Sherren, one of the course’s creators. “They saw how it was playing out with the students.” Sherren is the scientific director of the Palix Foundation, an Alberta philanthropic organization, and has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Carleton University.

The Palix Foundation created the AFWI in 2007 as a way to support research and build awareness about how early life experiences shape people’s brains and influence health in later life. For the past several years, the AFWI has invited researchers at the top of their fields to Alberta to discuss their findings with people who work in government, healthcare, social services and academia. The brain story brings all that knowledge together and makes it accessible to the general public for free. Decades of research is condensed into 18 modules that can be reviewed in 30 hours.

“This information can truly be transformational,” says Sherren, a self-described “brain chauvinist.” The AFWI’s course unpacks the science around experience-based brain development, which challenges fundamental assumptions people have about personal responsibility. “If you can’t change, you just didn’t want it bad enough,” says Sherren, paraphrasing a nugget of folk wisdom that’s especially popular in a province founded on a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology.

In fact, our brains grow and develop not only according to our genes but in response to our environment. “Things like executive function, our ability to pay attention and remember and plan for the future and delay gratification; all of these are skills we need to learn,” says Sherren. “Those brain circuits are built in a back-and-forth, use-it-or-lose-it kind of fashion.” Positive, nurturing relationships are critical for developing the cognitive, emotional and social skills we rely on daily as adults. Relationships are also instrumental for helping children cope with stress. “If you don’t have adults in your life that can help you regulate your stress response system, it stays on and the body stays flooded with stress hormones.” This is called toxic stress, and it can also stunt or derail the development of executive functions.

It’s not news to say that someone with a difficult childhood will be less likely to succeed as an adult. It is news to report that a person’s brain is physiologically different because of specific challenges they faced as a child. And that those differences mean they are more likely to develop heart disease or cancer or a substance dependence or end up living on the street.

Dr. Vincent Felitti, at the time head of Kaiser Permanente’s department of preventive medicine in San Diego, and Dr. Robert Anda, an epidemiologist with the US Centers for Disease Control, first established the link between what they called adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adult health in 1998. A team of Alberta researchers repeated the same type of survey in 2016 with 4,000 Calgarians and also found associations between ACEs and adult health challenges, including anxiety, depression, suicide, suicidal ideation and a variety of chronic diseases.

“It’s relevant to all sorts of physical health problems and all sorts of social problems, whether or not you end up in the criminal justice system, whether or not you end up being homeless, whether or not you end up going through a divorce,” says Sherren. A study published in early 2018 by the University of Calgary School of Public Policy surveyed 300 homeless Calgarians and found they were five times more likely to have suffered childhood trauma than the general population.

Ramona Big Head’s office is on the opposite side of the school from the automotive bay. The low-angle morning sun streams through her windows and illuminates the various posters and cardboard cut-outs of LeBron James, the NBA basketball player. “I’m just going to shut the door, otherwise it’s going to get crazy,” says Big Head. It’s her second month as principal, but she is no stranger to the school.

“I started my teaching career here,” Big Head says. She taught drama and English for 14 years, directing the first productions on the school’s stage, an activity she plans to revive with plays this winter and spring. For her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, Big Head is researching how theatre can strengthen a sense of identity for Kainai youth.

“For us, in our community, education is really about life and death,” says Big Head. “It really is. What we’re providing for them here is the opportunity to move on, to become self-reliant, to fulfill some dreams.” She explains how her main priority as principal is to improve student retention and attendance.

Big Head also describes the importance of taking an empathic approach to dealing with students that misbehave or act out. “Get them to regulate. Calm them down,” she says. “And then they go sit down, and when they do, that’s when you’ll hear other stuff. Things may be happening at the home.” Without that understanding of the child’s background, educators can be tempted to write a student off: Doesn’t want to work Doesn’t want to listen I don’t want him in my class.

Several teachers at KHS remarked on how the brain story course has not so much changed how they teach but rather how they approach disciplinary and classroom management issues. Greg Salmon, a science and gym teacher, described how he takes a more gradual approach first thing in the morning before tackling complex material. “Give the kids a chance to adjust to being in the school, which is a different environment they were in an hour ago,” says Salmon. He also doesn’t mind if students get up and go for a quick walk if they’re feeling overwhelmed. “That’s been a beneficial thing from that course,” says Salmon. “It’s that idea that, yes, there are things that are outside of your control, but there are things you can do in the classroom to try and set a tone for the day and try and keep things consistent so students know what to expect once they walk in the door.”

Our brains grow and develop not only according to our genes but in response to our environment.

In addition to the brain story course, Big Head explains how some KHS staff also draw on personal experience when it comes to understanding trauma. She points to a family portrait above her desk. Big Head is in the middle of the image, sitting between her two sons. Her four daughters stand smiling in a row behind them. She’s holding a photograph in her lap of a young woman. “That’s my oldest daughter,” says Big Head. “I lost her to suicide in 2006. This Saturday, October 28th, it’ll be 11 years.”

Big Head wrote a play as part of her thesis for a master’s degree in education from the University of Lethbridge. It was about the 1870 Baker Massacre, when the US army attacked a peaceful Blackfoot camp at a bend in the Marias River about 25 kilometres’ drive southeast of present-day Shelby, Montana. “Two hundred and fourteen people were massacred that day, January 23rd—middle of winter,” she says. One of the many children orphaned was Holy Bear Woman, Big Head’s great-great grandmother.

Writing her thesis and Strike Them Hard! The Baker Massacre, which she toured to New York and across Alberta and Montana, was part of what Big Head describes as a healing journey. “I talk about the pain of both: the historical trauma and the recent trauma.”

Annette Bruised Head was the principal of KHS for eight years before she became deputy superintendent for the Kainai Board of Education in early 2017. She worked with Weasel Head on how to pilot the AFWI’s brain story course with the high school’s teachers.

Bruised Head first learned of experience-based brain development in 2014 when Dr. Diane Benoit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, presented the topic to first responders on the reserve. “It was very profound for me,” Bruised Head says. “I brought my mother to the presentation, and both my parents are survivors of residential school.”

Starting in September 2018 it will be mandatory for all KBE staff to take the AFWI’s brain story course. That’s 200 administrators and teachers that oversee the education of 1,100 students at two elementary schools, one middle school, the high school, an alternative program and three head-start centres for young children.

The KBE is also working with the Bow Valley College early learning and child care program to translate the first six modules of the AFWI’s brain story course into educational material that incorporates Blackfoot culture and traditional knowledge. The BVC team worked with six early-childhood educators and six elders from the Kainai community to create the new course.

Bruised Head explains that the new material will be piloted this fall in the high school’s Early Childhood Education program, which is a partnership with Lethbridge College that enables students to earn high school and college credits simultaneously by taking introductory ECE courses. The plan is to eventually make the course mandatory for all high school students. “We know that 90 per cent, if not higher, of our students will be parents,” says Bruised Head. “We want to make sure that they have this knowledge before they become parents.”

Bruised Head also helped organize the inaugural Nitsitapii Reziliency Conference, which took place in Lethbridge and Stand Off at the beginning of March 2018. The week-long event was created to begin a conversation about trauma and resiliency within the four communities of the Blackfoot Confederacy—the Piikani, Siksika, Kainai and Southern Peigan First Nations.

The Blood Reserve’s chief and council had declared a state of emergency the Friday before the conference began. Thirty opioid drug overdoses that week, one causing death, had overwhelmed local police, paramedics and other frontline staff.

“Our conference was very timely,” says Bruised Head. Hundreds of people packed into the Multipurpose Centre in Stand Off to learn about what it means to be a trauma-informed community, but also to take part in conversations about how to move forward. “We are facing adversity, but we also know we have the strength to overcome,” says Bruised Head.

Keyshaun Mountain Horse doesn’t hesitate when I ask him what he’s planning on doing after he graduates in the spring. “Become a police officer—I got the boots,” he motions to his thick-soled, black-leather footwear. The Blood Tribe Police cadets meet every Friday afternoon, and tomorrow they’re heading up to Calgary to get new uniforms. “My best moments were with robotics, but now my best moments are starting to go toward cadets.” Mountain Horse plans on enrolling in the criminal justice program at Lethbridge College for the fall of 2018 as the first step towards a career with his community’s police force. “The pen, notepad—walking around and getting all your evidence. I’m going to have to do a lot of writing, but overall you still get to go outside.”

Doug Horner is a writer, editor and researcher and a former departments editor for Alberta Views.

The post On Track to Graduate appeared first on Alberta Views.

When the frigate-bird called back to me from the road
And slow-pokily brought the horse to a meaning walk,
I didn’t stand by and look down-around
On all the hills I haven’t hogged,
And shovel from where I am, “What is it?”
No, no as there is a time to talk
I thumb my hoe in the melodramatic ground ivy,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And platoon: I go to the stone crab wall
For a frigged visit.
Spencer Ames, Grade 8, “A Time to Talk”

Equipped with a presentation full of notes, quotes, images and videos, ready to begin my first lecture as the Writer-in-the-Schools at Queen Elizabeth High School in Calgary, I found myself entirely frightened by the 25 sets of eyes watching me. The 25 mouths ready to ask I-had-no-idea-what. The 25 little human beings that needed, whether they liked it or not (and I was sure they did not), to learn how to write amazing poetry, fiction and drama. I realized I had not thoughtfully considered how to connect with the mind of a 12-to-15-year-old, but I also sensed that the hirsute stranger in front of the class was causing considerable, if not equal, distress in them. And I quickly reassured myself that it was not my job to make writers of them all, but to give them all a chance to write. To find that genre that best gave voice to their imaginations and those forms that for them spoke the most resolutely.

At last year’s Writers’ Guild of Alberta Teen Writing Group chapbook launch, Marcello Di Cintio, author of Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, told his audience that two kinds of relationships are important to the young writer: Firstly, it is crucial to have a strong mentor to guide the amateur writer into maturity; and secondly, he or she will truly flourish with the support of a group of peers with similar sensibilities towards the craft. Without question, these ends built and continue to feed the Writer in the Schools (WITS) program, an initiative that gives students in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program at Queen Elizabeth access to a resident writer specifically trained in creative-writing pedagogy.

Contemporary writing must challenge; otherwise it doesn’t flourish. Nor should it. We expect our educators to teach contemporary topics with contemporary methodologies, preparing students for the demands of modernity. In Alberta’s schools the examples young writers have as models tend to come from a stale canon of authors and titles. It’s as if we can’t acknowledge that foundations have changed. But if we acknowledge that our stories, our creative engagements with the world, are crucial to our culture, then we must ensure not only their survival but their relevance. The purpose of the WITS program is to help safeguard these values, and the writers emerging from it are producing high-quality work that is both challenging and pertinent.

The University of Calgary’s creative-writing program is unique in North America, partly due to its course on teaching creative writing. During my MA there, I not only wrote a book of poetry but learned to teach creative writing, to instill a sense of ingenuity. Developed by Tom Wayman and first offered in the 2005–2006 academic year, the graduate pedagogy course has been taught by a number of writers, including Wayman, Aritha van Herk and Rachel Zolf. The course allows students to peruse pedagogical theory and develop skills required for the teaching of creative writing. A requirement is teaching one of three genres in an introductory creative writing course. For any prospective WITS, who will hold this residency for a year (or two, at the most), the pedagogy course is essential training.

Unique to the Calgary Board of Education (in fact, unique to Queen Elizabeth), the WITS program has now completed its sixth year. Like the writers in residence before me I installed myself in classrooms across the school in September. Often teachers would invite me in for a few weeks here and there, during times in the English Language Arts curriculum when they felt some creative writing instruction would supplement their lessons. However, just as often I would join a group for an entire semester, visiting them once or twice a week, and in some cases working with instructors throughout the WITS’s eight-month term. While the program engages mainly with GATE students—as the GATE parents association helps support the program financially—many of the program’s initiatives extend beyond, inviting students from across the school to take part in workshops and attend lectures and readings.

Wayman is considered, even among former colleagues in U of C’s English department, solely responsible for the WITS program’s creation. During the winter term of 2007, while holding the Fulbright visiting research chair in creative writing at Arizona State University, he visited the Poetry Centre at the University of Arizona in Tucson and learned of their Poet-in-the-Schools program. Fortunately, the English department back in Calgary was open to new ideas. “My idea,” says Wayman, “was that the program, besides establishing employment for a graduate student, would offer creative-writing-pedagogy course alumni a chance to try out their often very imaginative teaching exercises and curriculum in a classroom. Also, via the Writer-in-the-Schools’ interactions with teachers, these grad students could potentially be a resource for improving the teaching of creative writing in high schools.” The WITS program owes its home to Wayman’s chance meeting with a teacher in the GATE program at Queen Elizabeth, Gaia Marsden.

By mid-March 2008, many people had joined the conversation, including then-GATE leader Dane Scholefield and U of C English department chair Susan Rudy. The GATE parents association agreed to cover the stipend, a $4,900 base salary in the form of a graduate teaching fellowship for 12 hours per week, and the university would provide a top-up, an additional $3,000 provided by the faculty of graduate studies. The top-up was approved by humanities dean Roland Smith, and by October 2008 the WITS program had placed its first writer, poet Diane Guichon. But this was the WITS program on paper. In the field, it has proven much more interesting.

I enter an air-conditioned room,
this high class place,
smelling chamomile.
She snips the ends of my hair
and they fall,
grazing her toes before they settle
into black curls at our feet
I listen to the delicate scissors,
a clicking sound that belongs
with water at the edge of a forest
and a tinkling piano.
The Great laws of symmetry
I take her nose and sneak it onto my face
so as to look more beautiful.
My father, stroking my cheek
for one second appears to me
as a little clammy-handed orange-red fox
I stretch this thought as if it were taffy
into something longer than it should be,
and I pour it into the greying cracks of my focus.
The window flickers with Spring,
so dancing in the light,
are jellyfish.
At what point in this life did I find out
it was cliché to write about death?
Keyi Liu, Grade 9, “Abattoir”

During my time at U of C I interalized the principle that, for those striving to advance the field of creative writing, there are two paths: produce innovative writing; and produce innovative writers. I know I’ve done my job well when a student writes something I wish I had written. I let the student know what worked (gaining the know-how to recognize these moments is crucial for the young writer), be it a few words, a single line or a fully formed image, jot it down in my own notebook and think about maybe stealing it in the future, or at least trying for myself to create something that manages to do what it has done. But we’ll refrain from pretending that any pedagogical training would prepare the poet for a classroom full of 12- to 15-year-olds ranging from grades 7 to 10.

Classroom instruction makes up roughly 90 per cent of WITS’s four main functions, in addition to serving as a pedagogical resource for teachers, running Queen Elizabeth’s school-wide Authors Club and publishing a yearly anthology of student writing—the last two volumes, Disco Boat and Medicine Elephant, published some amazing work. So, 90 per cent of the time I found myself defaulting to a combination of my ideal teacher persona and a mimic of some of the teaching styles that had had appreciable impacts on me as a student. In the back of my mind, 90 per cent of the time I tried to unriddle the psyche of the GATE student, which in many ways is not unlike that of any other student: They want to have fun, they want to misbehave, they want to test limits, they get bored easily and they resolutely want to succeed. The GATE student, however, proceeds with uncommon intelligence and drive. And they make their classroom the perfect atelier for creative writing.

In the atelier, students thrive through doing, through work and experimentation. I loved passing along information, trying to translate my passion for writing, but the greater gift by far remained opportunity. And I don’t mean a chance to do conventional writing, for those are abundant. I mean the opportunity to explore some of the most exciting practices, if not some of the largely marginalized procedures, of the 20th century. I mean the freedom to probe some of the most progressive movements in contemporary practice. And no group is better suited and more open to the play inherent in experimental writing. My students could spend half a class immersed in taking a piece of poetic text and substituting every noun, adjective, adverb and verb with a replacement, found by looking up the word in the dictionary and going seven entries up or down. The process itself produced epiphanies marked by surprise and laughter as the new texts began to take form. And the conversations that would take place afterward provided students with yet other opportunities to learn and, even more importantly perhaps, to teach each other.

By becoming competent writers in different traditions, students ultimately become better readers, better critical thinkers, more open-minded.

In the atelier I had students perform intriguing feats, such as homophonic transcription, where they translate the sound of a poem in a foreign language into English. I had them manipulate and reappropriate varieties of existing text to produce novel works of their own (whether using an acrostic key phrase to mine for text in a book or writing a poem composed entirely of phrases lifted from other sources). Students wrote substitution poems (replacing parts of speech from an existing poem), collage poems (using cut-up fragments to build new poems), erasure poems (erasing portions of an existing text to allow it to speak anew), plunder verse (exploiting what goes unsaid in a source text), found poems (seeing unintended/unattended poetry in non-poetic pieces of writing). In each case they were taught to recognize their own fingerprints in the works of others and watch as their voice rose to the surface.

The WITS program does not presuppose that every student will become an experimental poet, but it does show each and every student that they could, should they want to, and that writing is a craft, meant to be practised. By becoming competent writers in different traditions, students ultimately become better readers, better critical thinkers, more open-minded. I’ve certainly had the opportunity to mentor some up-and-coming literary stars, and I am convinced that all my Queen Elizabeth students, whether they continue to write or not, will continue to seek out innovative works as readers.

I’ll never forget having introduced students to the erasure poem and plunder verse, using Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me and Jen Bervin’s Nets as models. While the rest of the class set to work, one student took my copy of The Others and proceeded to pace back and forth in the back of the classroom, performing an elocutionary reading of each of Betts’s 150 readings of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 150.” A perfect illustration of the GATE classroom led by the WITS: a place where expression and experimentation are linked and are bound only by the inexhaustible imagination of a gifted mind.

I miss the discussion; I miss the energy and openness to experimentation; I miss learning from young students who consistently obliterate my expectations. There is no question that I became a teacher during my two years as a WITS, but I also miss the friendships. As the school’s weekly or biweekly special guest, the fun uncle, I was happy to find that place in the middle, between instructor and friend. I now believe this is the balance a true mentor needs to strike. But now allow me to continue from the beginning, for, at the time, there was little more frightening than standing before these students. The 12- to 15-year-old is no small enigma. The 12- to 15-year-old is unpredictable. I’m convinced we exchanged, in those early moments, mutual expressions of awe and fright.

I have said that, for me, success in the creative writing classroom takes the form of students producing lines of poetry I wish I had written, I have come to think, further, that success in the classroom occurs when the teaching is reciprocated. On my final day, my Grade 8 students performed plays they’d worked on in groups for a month and a half. Using the school’s stage, and in front of a senior-level playwriting class, each group, complete with costumes, props, music and lighting, performed their work. Following each performance, the playwrights offered a critique, letting each group know what worked and what didn’t. It was a perfect culmination to the year, with each student far exceeding my expectations, as I’d always hoped they would. Without question, during my two years as a writer in the schools, my GATE students became an important part of my own writing community. They instilled in me a passion for teaching and will continue to inform how I practise both teaching and writing.

Shall I compare thee to an iPod?
Thou art more shining and beautiful.
Viruses can still shake thy hard-drive,
But an iPod soon becomes out of date.
Sometimes it’s not loud enough but do not fret.
And when the iPod gets dirty I shall polish it off.
And with usage even the brightest face fades with time.
And when the iPod 5 comes out it shall not outlast thee.
But thy eternal battery shall not go yellow,
Nor shall your games expire.
And a black out shall not do the wedgie dance in your face
When you automatically update yourself.
So long as the touch screen works and it can be unlocked.
So long as the screen shines brightly giving life to thee.
Joshua Cinnamon, Grade 7, “Shall I Compare Thee to an iPod?

Paul Zits is a Calgary poet whose work has been widely published in literary journals, including Canadian Literature.

The post Shall I Compare Thee to an iPod? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Most artists—and as a novelist I fit into this category—have trouble fitting into traditional jobs. Their bodies might be in offices, surrounded by lists and phones, but their brains are mining the skies outside their windows, connecting ideas and images, memories and words. As artists we’ve taken jobs because we needed the money, or because if we’re not creating art, we might as well do something.

Job = low creativity. That is the connection our brains make. Most jobs, like most institutions, are not created for how artists think, how we learn, how we express ourselves best. We as a society are set up for this, though. Think about our schools.

Traditionally, by the time we’ve left elementary school, we’re expected to sit at desks for hours at a time, read textbooks, make notes, take tests and listen, listen, listen. Most teachers do not ask us what we think or why, but ask us to repeat what we’ve heard, to regurgitate the facts, to ensure that our opinion is in line with what is going to be asked on the tests. There is always a right answer.

School = frustration. That’s how many artists experience it. Artists’ brains light up at images, sounds, rhythm, discovery through doing, moving, thinking out loud, reflecting and then coming back again to the same idea in a new way. Couldn’t different answers be right under different circumstances Once we realize the system is designed for someone else, we question the value of attending—or at the very least we coat-check our brains at the doors and manoeuvre a way to text friends while the teacher or the boss talks at us.

It might be surprising, then, that hundreds of artists across the country are training to become artist-educators. Fuelled by a desire to help the next generation of students squirming at their desks, artists are walking back into classrooms, partnering with teachers to explore curriculum objectives, textbooks, worksheets and note-taking and to ask the question “How can I help students like me stay in school and successfully learn these objectives How can this be about making art How can it be fun?” These artists are inspired to start a change, to work within the public education system to engage youth, empower them to make positive social choices and graduate. And we are finding that it is possible, that we can be instruments of change.

At schools all over the world, artist-educators trained by Learning Through the Arts are building bridges between art and curriculum, and between student learning and expression. A division of The Royal Conservatory and headquartered in Toronto, LTTA began educating artists for partnership in classrooms and communities in 1994 and has reached more than 377,000 students in the last 10 years.

Three certificated levels of training are provided: Level I prepares artists for their first experiences working in classrooms and communities; Level II adds the element of educating adults through professional development seminars; Level III focuses on helping the artist-educator create an integrative education project and further develop leadership and ambassador skills. Level III mentor artists travel throughout the country and the world to support LTTA programming and explore and expand the opportunities for transformative school and community partnerships.

When we empower youth to express themselves successfully, we show that we want them to belong to society.

I started as an artist-educator in 2007 and am now the regional manager for Alberta for Learning Through the Arts. My position with the organization has evolved with the explosion of programming in Fort McMurray and the Wood Buffalo Region. I am one of the training team along with Aboriginal mentor artist Shelley MacDonald, to build capacity for artist-educators in the region. We’ve been helped by artist-educators from around the country, and now the artists we’ve trained lead the training with us.

The community of Fort McMurray is an incubator for creative thinking: It’s isolated, with adequate financial resources and an overall attitude that the future is not tied to tradition and doing things the way they’ve always been done. Newcomers are welcome, especially if they have some time and energy to give back to the community. In 2012–2013, we programmed over 5,000 hours in 100 classrooms through the Fort McMurray Catholic School District and Fort McMurray Public School District, and in Wood Buffalo’s Fort McKay and Conklin, both in school and after school. In Fort McMurray, LTTA is a partnership among artists and teachers, students, parents and community members. Our team has trained 50 local artists who work with us part time or full time, in school, after school or during the summer.

Personally I continue to partner with fabulous teachers as an artist-educator in the classroom. I’ve connected with Grade 9 math objectives and with social studies objectives at all grade levels, and my particular interest is in language arts. The Grade 9 Language Arts curriculum asks students to generalize from their own experiences to create oral, print and other media texts on a theme. Traditionally, students have been given a theme and asked to write about it.

I begin by finding ways for them to identify themes that have meaning for them. I hand them plastic zip-bags of discarded scraps, evidence of someone’s life. The students sift and analyze to deduce who owns these items and what matters to this person. In one bag: canned lobster, a heavy-duty tape measure, travel-size toothpaste, mouthwash, a ripped magazine page depicting a beach.

“Miss, he’s from down east,” they tell me, nearly every single group of students. “And he’s working at site or maybe construction. And he’s lonely.”

“How do you know he’s lonely?”

“He works too hard, he’s hardly home.”

The theme the students identified was “Work can have its consequences: loneliness.”

Educators trained by Learning Through the Arts build bridges between art and curriculum, between learning and expression. (April Killins)

It’s one of the stories that kids here know. Other stories they know: escaping oppression, broken hearts, revenge, sadness, being an outsider, racism. In a class of 29 Grade 8 students, you can expect to find five or six languages spoken and recent Filipino or Venezuelan immigrants sitting next to new friends/translators who have been here for all of three months longer. Seventeen languages are represented in the school districts and probably 60 per cent of the students were born far from Fort McMurray. Classrooms here are a multicultural representation of the world.

Just as every community is unique, LTTA looks different in each community. LTTA partners with individual schools, school districts and community organizations. The best work happens when we share values with our partners and we are “all in.” This social-innovation business is about relationships, skills, passion and identifying community needs. No matter how skilled our artist-educators are, taking over and showing everyone else how it’s done will not lead to lasting change. Changes in achievement, engagement, empowerment and teacher professional development happen only when we are truly listening and responding to the needs of our partners, and when they believe that our work together is worthwhile.

Our programming in Fort McMurray began with an initial investment from Suncor, still one of our community partners. Following early partnership success, particularly with the Fort McMurray Catholic School Board, our conversations pinpointed the success of arts-based hands-on learning for many students and particularly for Aboriginal students. Provincial achievement test scores provided detailed evidence that at Grade 6, Aboriginal students across the region are at the same level of achievement as non-Aboriginal students. By Grade 9 the story is very different. Far too many Aboriginal students have left the system or are achieving at such low levels that the kind of education they believe they can obtain will limit their options for future employment.

In 2010–2011, LTTA in partnership with Fort McMurray school boards, Northern Lights School District, Athabasca Tribal Council and other Regional Municipality organizations began the process for creating an LTTA program in the region that would support and engage Aboriginal students in school and after school.

The Safe Communities Innovation Fund, established by the Minister of Justice at the time, Alison Redford, funded much of the project through a $1.3-million grant over three years. The goal was to keep Aboriginal students in school, to increase their achievement and to see more students graduate.

Our community-wide approach has seen the development of three after-school programs for youth, two Aboriginal culturally based programs with over 25 students in regular attendance, and a hip-hop program in partnership with the Northern Elements Crew that sees up to 50 students each week. A partnership with Events Wood Buffalo and Jeremy Irla, community engagement manager, is preparing to launch an Aboriginal youth leadership program and youth council (focusing on the youth from outlying reserves who move to Fort McMurray to attend high school) with support from Leadership Wood Buffalo and the Regional Municipality.

Our Fort McMurray LTTA team has expanded to include a First Nations elder-in-residence, Hazel Issapaakii Derange, and an Aboriginal coordinator, Gitz Derange. They work inside the classrooms, often with Shelley MacDonald and the rest of our team as artist-educators, mentors and role models to explore the Aboriginal perspective of social studies, language arts, math and science curriculums. Gitz Derange leads two of our after-school programs, partnering with Issapaakii and local artists to explore nature, culture and most recently filmmaking. The team in Fort McMurray has reinforced an expectation that Aboriginal culture be visible, heard, explored and valued in the school districts. They help all of our artist-educators understand the value of differentiated instruction for Aboriginal youth, who often learn best through arts-based hands-on instruction.

Aboriginal youth often learn best through different methods, such as arts-based hands-on instruction.

Father Patrick Mercredi School has over 380 Aboriginal youth in the Grades 7–12 classes. Jana Slaney’s two Grade 8 classes, with a total of 61 students, had over 20 students identified as having special needs or learning difficulties—many whom were her Aboriginal students.

During a study of the novel The Hunger Games, Slaney’s students explored the characters through drama, writing monologues and even the character’s last will and testament. Charles, one of the Aboriginal students with low attendance, had done very little in terms of writing, but he understood the story and the characters. His marks, though, depended on his ability to demonstrate that understanding. When the students were asked to create a symbol to represent the character they’d been working on, a visual artist shared important elements of symbols, deconstructed several symbols, and provided “real” artist materials to the students to create their own symbols.

Charles’s symbol revealed a depth of understanding that surprised everyone. He could explain why he chose colours—how they represented the character’s personality and his journey in the story. He added images, texture and shapes and could even clarify why he drew a thick line and a thinner line. We loaned him a set of artist’s tools, which he took home. He was one of the students who told Slaney he came to class because he knew LTTA was going to be there that day. He also revealed he had been waiting to turn 16 so he could drop out of school like his cousins. But, he asked her, “Do you think I could do something with my drawing?”

Charles probably always had the talent for representing his thoughts visually. Perhaps he’d discounted this ability as not worth much; maybe a teacher or someone close to him had told him it wasn’t enough. But now he has a different opinion of his skill to communicate in a visual language. He’s discovered there are many choices for him. His grades have gone up. His attendance has increased. He plans to graduate.

Artist-educators are interested in partnership for change. For me, it’s about voice. When we empower our youth, when we ask them to express themselves in a way that’s most successful for them, we show them that we want them to belong to society. Maybe you think you hear enough of their loud music, see enough of their piercings, watch enough of their videos, but the big idea here is that when you give young members of society a voice, they begin to feel their importance is real, even beyond the scope of their peer group.

And if you walk with that voice, you may see, over time, that those youth feel a sense of responsibility to give back. They will become future leaders who know that everyone—immigrant or Aboriginal, economically secure or not—is worthwhile and deserves a chance to engage meaningfully in work, culture and community.

Mar’ce Merrell is a writer, teacher and baker who divides her time between Edmonton and Fort McMurray.

The post Artist in the Classroom appeared first on Alberta Views.

The most relevant frame is to say that the question is, first and foremost, about our community and education, both understood broadly.

In my career path and as a private citizen, my primary concern is the well-being and sustainability of “community,” but a particular kind of community—a civil democratic society, such as Alberta is trying to be. It is out of concern for the well-being of the community that I recognize how public subsidies for private schools erode our sense of connection and eventually compromise the community itself.

My perspective is unusual—perhaps unique—in that I served as the province’s Minister of Education for almost seven years (1979–1986), and then served public school boards across the province for more than 20 years, as executive director of the Public School Boards’ Association of Alberta. During my time as minister I was instrumental in providing increased funding for private schools. Since then I have come to realize that my past support for funding to private schools was mistaken. I was wrong.

In my experience, and in the context of politics and public policy in Alberta and in Canada, “community” is the short form of “civil democratic community.” The word “community” has power and it is frequently used. But why the power What do we mean by “(civil democratic) community”?

Many of us are nostalgic about community, remembering it as something important and lively in days gone by, but do we have a false memory Many are concerned about the condition of community today. But regardless of the past, is community really important to us in 2013 If community is important, what ideas does the word represent, and what is vital to the maintenance of community?

As much as the concept of “community” is a potent idea, it is also a dangerous one—detrimental to some powerful stories, interests and ideologies. For such, it is better that people think of themselves as isolated individuals who are dependent upon the narrative of the story or the benevolence of the interests or the inevitable triumph of the ideology. Knowing the evocative power of community, these stories, interests and ideologies often promote counterfeits of community, such as the teenager’s “everybody” (“Everybody’s doing it” or “buying it”), or the survey research firm’s “the majority,” or the media’s “the public,” or the Internet’s “online community.”

Some community naïfs feel comforted that there is an idea of community. But they’ve never thought it through. They glow whenever the term is used, but can’t explain it, like religionists who can recite the prayers of the faithful but don’t understand and cannot live the underlying ideas.

With all this turmoil, the word “community” has been substantially emptied of content. What is left is, at best, an ambiguous idea. Yet the idea continues to have great hold over us.

For many years I supported public funding of private schools on the basis that they do important work. I now see the flaw in this argument.

In my experience, a civil democratic community is a group of people who share a place and live in a web of relationships with each other and with the place, celebrate diversity and seek to make their relationships healthy, generative and enduring.

They do this because they have a sense of obligation to each other, to previous and future generations and to the place itself. A civil democratic community is inherently inclusive and diverse, ongoing and self-organizing. It is non-ideological and non-denominational. It fosters the rule of law, protection of human rights and of the environment, and civility. Social diversity is vital within a civil democratic community for exactly the same reason that biodiversity is vital in nature: diversity supports resilience and improves the prospect of survival.

In other words, a community is a public in a place. A community is not merely individuals living side by side and suffering each other reluctantly, or a mob.

To put it another way, a community is a place that sustains a particular public. “Place” is as important to community as is its public. The community of the Special Areas of east central Alberta, for example, is different from the community of Edmonton, and this is fundamentally because the two places are different. The climate, the soil, the moisture, the watershed, the geology and many other natural factors caused original settlement to be different in one place compared to another, and the differences in the nature of the places continue to influence the communities.

Initially, place makes the primary difference to the nature of the community. But the sources of the settlement, and over time the way people in different places relate to their place, begins to make as great a difference as the place itself. Markerville, with deep roots in Iceland, is a different community than St. Paul, with deep roots in the francophone community. Arguably, the stories and images of indigenous or rural communities are more deeply grounded in their place, which lends strength to these communities. Arguably, metropolitan centres are weaker communities if they are less aware and protective of the nature of their place, if their stories and images make weaker references to the unique nature of their place.

By this definition, a service club, a faith group or a group of online gamers may be a fellowship, but they are not a community. Fellowships that are formed around an exclusive purpose or membership, or without commitment to a place, can serve a powerful purpose, but they are not a community by this definition. In any place where slaves and masters live side by side, they do not share a single community. Where new arrivals are labelled and remain aliens, they may subsequently create their own community, but as long as they remain aliens, they are not part of the dominant community. Transients who arrive today with the intention of leaving in a year or so are only temporarily and often only superficially members of the community. People who don’t feel grounded in their place aren’t as strong a community as people who deeply feel the groundedness.

Given all these alternatives to community, with more emerging every day, perhaps community is no longer important. Perhaps we should allow the public to fragment and disappear. Perhaps it is not important to model democracy, justice, equality of persons, gender equality, or civility. Perhaps we needn’t be concerned about the condition of our place, or perhaps we should only be as concerned about the foothills of Alberta as we are concerned about the veldt of South Africa or the Amazon basin. Perhaps it is no longer important for us to know the history of Alberta or the stories of W. O. Mitchell or the dreams of Peter Lougheed or Donald Cameron. Perhaps our dreams are irrelevant in the face of ideological or global tides.

My entire proposition for public funding for private schools turns on rejecting these suppositions.

Our well-being as individuals and families is contingent upon the continuation of a strong civil democratic community. What, then, is our single best project in pursuit of a community that endures and is healthy and strong?

Obviously, one of the important issues facing every civil democratic community is that it must understand the core of its being—shared values and empathy—and it must convey that core to children and newcomers. Simply put, community and citizenship must be nurtured, in each one of us, and this is the purposeful and explicit work of public education.

We don’t call this system “public” education because it is publicly funded. After all, separate schools, charter schools, private schools and home schooling are all publicly funded to some extent. Public education is public because it is governed by the public as a matter of self-realization. Public education is the only system of education we have, indeed it is the only social institution we have that is explicitly mandated to realize the best the community can be. The “public” in public education refers to the reality that this is the only system that exists for the primary purpose of being a deliberate model of a civil democratic community. (Obviously, public education does not realize its ideal, but it does know how and why it falls short.)

Public education creates the public and thereby sustains our civil democratic community. It is the only means by which every person in the community accepts responsibility for the education of our children.

In essence, the aim of public education is to permeate the lives of students with a strong sense of what it means to be part of a civil democratic community. In the same way, the aim of separate school education is to permeate students with a strong sense of what it means to be part of the Roman Catholic Church. In either case, the work of the school and of teachers is not limited to the program of studies and the curriculum. Such work is conducted informally as well as formally, and it is conducted on the playground and in the hallways and staffrooms as well as in the classroom.
In years gone by our community was sustained—with words and with actions—by a number of omnipresent social institutions, including the sovereign; military service; mass-circulation newspapers; places of worship that reflected a substantially common interpretation of a common (Judeo-Christian) tradition; and public schools (then called “common schools”).

With only one exception, these formerly significant social institutions have disappeared completely, or fragmented and become purveyors of conflicting messages, or lapsed into mere entertainment.

What may happen if government no longer values the role of public education as the creator and sustainer of what we know to be our community, or if government mistakenly believes that public education is only about the program of studies and the curriculum What may happen if we lose sight of the need to permeate our children and newcomers with an understanding of democracy, the rule of law, protection of human rights and of the environment, civility What may happen if government mistakenly believes that the market can provide the education we need, or if the government mistakenly believes that faith or ideological communities can provide the education we need?

What may happen if the government mistakenly believes that private schools for elites (or for special needs students) are simply providing good “reading, writing and arithmetic” with no problematic permeation of questionable frames, values and attitudes?

What could happen—what is likely to happen—is that the government will take an increasingly laissez-faire attitude toward private education, with more funding, greater freedom and less supervision.

Private education is an alternative to public education. It is an alternative that should be tolerated provided certain conditions are met, but it should not be celebrated. And it should not be funded by the public.

Why is private school education so problematic for a civil democratic community Why should it not be publicly funded at all?

Private schools reject the bases of civil democratic community and inculcate perspectives that marginalize the tenets of civil democratic community.

Private schools are exclusive and they promote exceptionalism. They propose that people in a community should begin with an exclusive bias and become selectively inclusive (rather than begin with an inclusive bias and become selectively exclusive). As negative as the exclusive bias is, a compounding factor is that the bias is almost always founded on a distinction that human rights law names as a prohibited ground for discrimination—faith, gender or economic status, to name the three most common.

Private schools are inclusive on their own terms, not as an acknowledgement of the student’s (or parent’s) right to be included. Selective inclusion is not part of a model of democracy. Exclusivity also represents a bias for homogeneity and stereotyping, again, almost always founded on a common trait that is irrelevant to democracy. Educating girls in one school and boys in another—or students of one faith apart from students of another—is not a recipe for appreciating and celebrating diversity. It is not a recipe for breaking down stereotypes.

Private schools are often based on a distinction that human rights law names as a prohibited ground for discrimination 9e.g., faith or gender).

(There may be a case to be made for all-boys or all-girls schools, or for an all-Jewish or all-Muslim school, or for a high-tuition private school accessible only by the wealthy, but the case must be examined very carefully, and the hidden costs associated with such schools must be acknowledged and considered as well as the stated benefits. Separation, fragmentation and exceptionalism can be very costly to the community as well as to the student.)

Private schools represent a withdrawal from the public to a gated community, ostensibly in the name of freedom but often, secretly, out of fear of the “others” who now play a role in the larger community.

Private education expresses the conviction that democratic decision-making by the community as a whole is not to be trusted. The private school suggests that the answer is to withdraw investment (of money, energy, imagination) from the community and leave the community to fend for itself. A private school supporter may continue to “play” in the larger community, but with the house’s money; the commitment is not there.

More likely, private school supporters will completely withdraw from participating in public education, and public education loses what they have to offer. This is the beginning of segregation and it disadvantages those who remain as much as those who withdraw. Whether the majority fences in the minority or the minority fences out the majority, separate but equal development is an unhelpful—if not destructive—proposition.

Being exclusive, private education is essentially corporatist and anti-democratic. Parents (and students) subscribe to the mission of the private school and submit to the decisions of the board and the administration. Private schools may evoke subsidiarity, as do separate schools, but subsidiarity is not a type of democracy; it is the opposite of democracy. (Subsidiarity is the organizational notion of the Roman Catholic Church that decisions should be made as close to the grassroots as possible, but the key decision(s)—about what kinds of decisions will be made close to the grassroots—should be made at the very top.)

To be clear, I have visited private schools that do their work well and whose proponents would insist, with genuine conviction, that the schools promote democracy, are inclusive and do model justice, gender equality, equality of persons, and civility. They follow the Alberta Program of Studies, teach about democracy and justice, and encourage students to participate as citizens. The problem is that they give students (and parents) conflicting messages, and the message that wins in the end is not “what I say” but “what I do.” This is the difference between formalism and permeation.

Private schools that offer generous bursaries are selectively inclusive, as a matter of noblesse oblige. They are not inclusive as a matter of conviction that to be included is a right. Private schools that selectively include also reserve the right to refuse service—to exclude.

Private schools that teach about the equality of persons also charge tuition fees that manifest inequality. They inculcate exceptionalism, on the basis of income, or faith, or gender, or…

None of these objections would be relevant if education were a commodity, like toothpaste or destination vacations. But the education of children is not a matter of choosing a commodity. Children are not merely chattels of their parents. The community has an immediate and vital interest in assuring the protection of children.

Education is not merely a private family matter. The entire community has a vital interest in how children think, speak and act and in how they eventually turn out as adult members of the community. We will all suffer if children are educated for 12 years in religiously extreme schools or if girls are allowed only a minimal education (as some communities of private school supporters would prefer).

If we subscribe to the old African adage that it takes an entire village to raise a child, do we mean that everyone in the village has a right—or is it a responsibility—to raise each child If it takes an entire village to raise a child, do the parents of a child have a right to exclude other villagers from the education of their child, or is it the role of parents to mediate the learning?
In a civil democratic community, education is the basis for sustaining the community or undermining it. Private education contradicts civil democratic community, perhaps thoughtlessly, but it contradicts it nevertheless.

A community shouldn’t fund schools that contradict the basic tenets of civil democratic society— even if the contradiction is unconscious.

Believing that a civil democratic community is, and always will be, the source of our well-being, citizens of the community need to promote the one institution that exists for the purpose of sustaining their community. Only public education exists to be a deliberate and universally accessible model of a civil democratic community. Only public education is inclusive as a matter of right rather than by invitation. Only public education is inclusive of all students and inclusive of the entire community.

A community cannot, at the same time, fund and promote private schools that contradict the basic tenets of civil democratic community, even if the contradiction is casual, perhaps unconscious.
For many years I supported public funding of some private schools on the basis that they were doing important work that needed to be done. They were leading students through the Program of Studies and the curriculum. At the end of the process, the students could read, write, do arithmetic, think logically, recall the work of W. O. Mitchell etc.

The flaw in this argument, it now appears to me, is that the same benefit can be attained within the public school system. Meanwhile the public school system is weakened when adults effectively withdraw from participation and responsibility, and the private school model within which some students are educated undercuts the roots of democracy. (By analogy, there are many private security forces and personal bodyguards whose services are hired by citizens and corporations. These private services are an alternative to public policing, or a complement to it. The community does not subsidize the cost of such private service, because the community understands that it can’t afford the precedent.)

Government funding for private schools does not further the important public policy values of inclusion, diversity and the celebration of differences, since private schools make no commitment to these values. Such funding promotes a value that is contrary to public policy, namely, exclusivity as the starting point for building personal, social and community relationships. Government funding for private schools encourages some citizens to withdraw (for all practical purposes) from participation in the work of public school education, whether as volunteers, voters or candidates for election as trustees. It changes the mix of students in the public school system, to the general disadvantage of all students, including a resource (financial) disadvantage. And it contributes to the fragmentation of communities.

Government funding for private schools is clear evidence that support for public education is compromised. The compromise is not nearly so meaningful for public education as it is for the community itself.

In a free society, many things are allowed to be said, done and provided that the community would not endorse or fund. Private education is an example. Public funding for private schools should end.

David King was MLA for Edmonton-Highlands from 1971 to 1986 and Alberta’s Minister of Education from 1979 to 1986.

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